From Descartes to Transhumanism

Dedicated to Pope Leo XIV

From Descartes to Transhumanism

True or False Salvation

There is a connection between Descartes as the “father” of modern philosophy and the development of the AI technology which is rapidly developing into “transhumanism”. Transhumanism is a philosophical movement that advocates for enhancing the human condition through advanced technologies, aiming to overcome limitations such as disease and mortality. This views technology as if it were able to be our “savior”, to save us from the two consequences of sin: sickness and death, which came upon the human race as a result of the fall of man. In truth, Jesus Christ alone can cure the human condition. He alone is able to save us from sin, the root cause of all the disorder of the world. He heals us from sin by His supreme holiness, His Church, and His Sacraments which help us to attain true sanctity.

Transhumanism has no regard for holiness, which is the only true cure for the sad condition of the human race. Rather, it sees technology as the “savior” from the fall. It explores the integration of humans with technology to create a new phase of human evolution. Transhumanists see human beings as “merging” with digital or robotic technology, having robotic intelligence implanted into their bodies. Imagine becoming a built-in “smartphone” with Siri for a perpetual counsellor! Transhumanism is a nightmare looming upon the horizon. Catholics must be aware and prepared to reject its false philosophy.

To combat this deceptive illusion, which is a false hope of salvation, Catholics must consciously preserve their trust in Jesus Christ as the Savior, with a willingness to suffer and endure sickness and pain when it is willed by God, and also to humbly submit to the degree of God to pass through death. In so doing we are able to merit a participation in the sufferings, passion, death, and redemption of Christ. That is the only way to heaven. Death is only a doorway which God asks us to pass through as a part of humility and reparation for the original sin.

The false philosophy of transhumanism seeks to eliminate death. It imagines salvation is something occurring in this world, in this life. Catholic doctrine shows that the perfect healing of the human race comes after the attainment of this perfect submission and obedience, including undergoing death. For Catholics, it is not in this world but in the next life that the full fruits of glory—freedom from all disease and mortality—will be revealed.

Contrary to the Gospel, transhumanists are still attempting to achieve the false promise of a self-attained glorified state in this world with no need for God. They continue to believe that we could become immortal if they simply develop enough technologies to combat every known cause of death in the body or outside of it, and protect ourselves against every possible accident. Yet they do not know what they are trying to achieve. They will only be miserable if they can manage to succeed by medicine and robotics to live even a thousand years upon this earth in a fallen and sinful condition without Christ. It is not wonderful to have a thousand years to accumulate sins and to have to struggle against the devil, which our warfare in this world entails.

We should not imitate those who follow after this false hope of immortality in this fallen world. Foolish people throughout human history have been seeking the miraculous fountain of youth. They looked for it in some miraculous spring of water, rather than in the font of holy baptism. Catholics should seek after grace and spiritual virtue. We should be willing to suffer purely and perfectly all the things that God wills, just as the saints and martyrs have done. The glorified state will be awarded to us in the heavenly life if we are faithful. There we will finally be confirmed in grace, free from sin, temptation, sickness and death forever!

This is not to say that we cannot make use of remedies or technologies on earth, if we see that they are able to be spiritually profitable in some way. But the progress of technology should never be regarded as a goal or as a means to salvation of the human race. There are many saints who discerned wisely by the Spirit of God when it was suitable to heal people, and when God was asking them to suffer, and even when it was their time to die. In that case, they did not pray for healing or try to achieve it against the will of God by technological or medical means. The spiritual good for the soul is what should be sought first of all.  It is important for Catholics in today’s world to limit technology to a tool which is used only inasmuch as is beneficial to the Church.

This article is an attempt to explore the connections between the philosophy of Descartes and the rise of this full manifestation of human-digital mind in today’s modern world. Nearly 400 years after Descartes, the philosophical seeds of evolution and the mathematical mind which he sowed are reaping a harvest of AI and transhumanism.

Many of the ideas explored in this article are speculative. It is not intended to teach or instruct, but only to explore. It is offering a challenge to readers to ask some daring and possibly even confrontational questions. May God spare us from all false ideas of spiritual perfection, through Christ Our Lord. Amen.

Descartes’ Temptation Against Faith

When Descartes came up with his famous statement “I think, therefore I am”, he imagined that he was paving the way towards a whole new way of thinking and reasoning in which knowledge could be somehow completely “sure”. In Descartes’ new system, everything in nature had a natural explanation. Gradual processes in nature offered a more “reasonable” way to account for the origins of man and the universe than belief in the supernatural Creation of God.

Descartes embraced evolutionary philosophy, rejected the supernatural, and turned man’s mind into a sort of reasoning machine in which thinking can be reduced to mathematical certainties like 2+2=4. This led to the philosophy of rationalism, which holds that there is no knowledge that transcends man’s reason. Thus, although perhaps Descartes did not realize this, according to rationalism there really is no such thing as supernatural Faith. Supernatural Faith involves using the intellect to assent to truths higher than the human mind. Supernatural Faith is beyond the limits of rationalism.

Descartes was originally a Catholic, but it is not difficult to see how the devil attacked his soul: against the supernatural virtue of Faith. It seems, unfortunately, that he succumbed. He had been influenced by a movement of skepticism, which was a philosophy becoming prevalent at that time. The skeptics doubted that any truth can be known with certainty. It should be obvious to any good Catholic that this entire movement of skepticism was in itself a temptation against Faith.

Supernatural Faith is the theological virtue by which one assents with one’s intellect to the truths which God has revealed, which come from Him as their source, and which are given to us and only known to us through Divine Revelation. These truths are the mysteries of the Creed and all the articles of Faith taught by Jesus Christ and by the Catholic Church. These truths contain mysteries, which exceed the capacity of man’s mind. Nevertheless, they are not contrary to reason; they are simply higher than reason.

The assent to Faith is a supernatural act. It is something like jumping off a diving board. There is an element of risk involved in deciding to believe God, simply because He is trustworthy. But this is what Faith is. It is not possible for a human being to possess supernatural Faith without grace. This is why it is said that Faith is a “gift”, because God alone can give the grace for someone to make that act which is above the natural human capacity. The person does not do it alone, but by cooperating with the grace of God. Why some do not do this is a mystery. It is not that God does not offer the gift of Faith to everyone; only some do not choose to accept it. Built in to the mystery of Faith is the mystery of human free will. Each man is free to choose whether he will cooperate with the grace of God or not.

When faced with the temptation of doubt, what should Descartes have done? He probably should have made many acts of supernatural Faith and asked God to get him through that time of doubt. If he had submitted his mind to the truth of revelation and resisted the temptations, the Lord would have surely strengthened him and revealed to him ever greater spiritual illuminations. Instead, he chose to try to find a way out that did not involve having to exercise any supernatural Faith but was located in his mind alone.

There is nothing truly “reasonable” about believing in naturalism to explain the origin of things in nature. This idea only appears more “reasonable” on the surface, because it does not require one to trust in God, or accept His Word or the Church’s teachings. It does not require opening the soul to anything invisible or spiritual. Naturalism invites us to believe that knowledge of the origins of man and the universe lies within reach of the unaided human intellect, without requiring grace or any supernatural assistance. For Descartes, that seemed to offer intellectual security. Yet, in fact, it accomplished the opposite. It led him and the rest of the world after him to a realm where truly nothing is infallibly certain. Scientific study is far from certain. As we know, scientists are changing their minds about their theories about how the universe works every day.

The only things of which we can be absolutely sure are the dogmas of the Faith infallibly defined by the Church and contained in the Apostles’ Creed. True Faith is the opposite of doubt and skepticism, and it resists it and opposes it. Just as St John says “perfect charity casts out fear” (1 John 4:18), so likewise it could be said that “perfect Faith casts out doubt”. Descartes, thinking he would find security, found nothing but finite and fallible human knowledge, perpetually striving after that assurance which nothing but believing God can ever give.

Theology Proceeds from Faith

Once the human intellect makes the decision to assent to the higher truths of Faith, it may proceed from there to contemplate that truth further and to carefully draw conclusions from it. This is how the theologians discovered Divine truths from contemplating Divine Revelation. It begins by believing in the revealed Truth as the given premise for reasoning, and from there it will go on through a logical process to discover what other details and depths those mysteries contain. It is a certain “unveiling” or “unpacking” of that supernaturally revealed truth.

This is how true theology occurs in the spiritual lives of saints, such as St Thomas Aquinas and other brilliant doctors of the Church, who were men of real Faith and prayer. They prayed and reflected and reasoned upon truth and drew conclusions to learn more about God. Next, they submitted those conclusions to the judgment of the Church for them to be ratified in time by God’s Holy Spirit working in the Church. That is theology.

When Descartes was faced with the temptation against Faith, he did not pass the test. He did not make the act of Faith to believe in God’s Word by trusting that God is true and cannot lie. He chose instead to reject the supernatural dimension and to limit knowledge to only what he could safely assent to without making a supernatural act of Faith. This is why his philosophy resulted in pure materialism. Once one rejects the supernatural, one has nothing left except for the material world to consider as a source of revelation.

Clearly this is the foundation for the modern framework of complete atheism, whose underlying principle and pre-determined committed bias is to exclude the supernatural as a cause for anything. It leads clearly to materialism.

Descartes wanted a mathematical certainty in knowing everything, as if all truth could be lowered to the level of a calculator answer. In other words, he did not want to experience the risk of Faith. He wanted absolutely no risk. He wanted no supernatural truth greater than his mind—in other words, no mysteries. This faithless philosophy automatically excludes the truth of the Holy Trinity, because God Himself is a mystery. Perhaps Descartes did not realize that this is what he was doing. He might have thought he was still a Catholic. But by taking this path, he was turning away from God in fundamental orientation, although nominally he may have remained a “Catholic”.

Probably Descartes might have become a brilliant theologian if he had chosen to be like the saints who rely upon God’s Divine Revelation as their source for true knowledge and illumination. Instead, he became the opposite of a theologian, a sort of anti-theologian, and became the cause of deception for many people in centuries to come. We can recall the words of Christ, Who said, “Woe to the world because of scandals. For it must needs be that scandals come: but nevertheless woe to that man by whom the scandal cometh.” (Mt. 18:7.) Descartes, through his lack of Faith, promoted the materialist and evolutionary philosophy which has become a scandal to the world and placed a stumbling block before many of God’s children.

The Pride of Rationalism

Rationalism is simply naturalism of the mind. In some ways, it is no different than evolution, which says that all the things in the biological world had to come to be through the power of nature and natural causes alone. Rationalism simply does this in the realm of thought. It says all the thoughts and supposed “truths” in the world have developed from man’s mind alone. Rationalism is related to naturalism, because rationalism, being the naturalism of the mind, sees its own thoughts as the source and summit of knowledge. This knowledge is, of course, evolutionary, and thus “consciousness” is seen as constantly developing, just like biological evolution.

Perhaps the readers could take a moment and just imagine what kind of pride it is to think that your own thoughts could be the source and summit of all knowledge! It’s really rather unbelievable. However, it goes further than that. For Descartes, “thinking” is not only the origins of this new reality of supposedly “certain” knowledge, but thinking is even seen as literally determining existence in Descartes’ mind. In other words, he is making himself like a god, out of whose mind comes all existence, of himself and everything else.

It ought to be apparent how much this smacks of a counterfeit of the Word of God, Jesus Christ, Who is Begotten of the Father. Christ is the very image of the Father, eternally Begotten by His Intellect and Will from all eternity. The Father knows Him in His Intellect, and He wills Him in His Love. In begetting His Son eternally, you could say that God sort of “thinks and then Christ IS”. The Father “thinks” of the Son, and the Son IS, and He is the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity. This has been going on from all eternity with no beginning, nor ever will have any end. Out of their mutual Love, contemplating One Another as Divine Persons, proceeds the Third Divine Person of the Most Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit.

God’s thinking literally does create existence, because not only does the Father know the Son in the Holy Spirit from all eternity, but He also created the whole world out of this knowing and loving, in which the Word and the Spirit were present and working as well. Yet God’s knowledge is not just mere knowing; it is also loving and unitive within the community of the Most Holy Trinity. Even when God created man, it was as an outpouring of His generosity, and with the intention to unite man with Himself in love.

All this is a very poor description of the Trinity, but it shows how on some level, the Knowledge in the Mind of the Father begetting the Son from all Eternity is what Descartes is apparently trying to imitate within himself. It mirrors the truth about God, but in a perverse way, because you remember that at the same time Descartes was renouncing the supernatural. It also leads to a bad spirit, a spirit of darkness, which is what characterized the so-called “enlightenment”, in which Divine Truth was being discarded in favor of the exaltation of human knowledge and reason.

Becoming an Anti-theologian

One difference between God and the devil is that the devil has only intelligence and no love. Thus the devil’s “intelligence” is just enlightenment, and not “illumination”. True illumination comes from God and is loving. The devil also has no unity or community, and therefore he is isolated and schizophrenic in his pride and hatred of God. It is an intelligence without charity and without community. It is good to pay attention to this, because this is exactly what Artificial Intelligence is like. We can recognize in Artificial Intelligence a similarity to the devil’s “loveless intelligence”, because it also is a product of knowing without loving, and without having being, or without anyone to truly communicate with. People who talk to artificial intelligence talk to nobody but themselves in a human echo-chamber. It leads people into a world of isolation and loss of true human relationships.

Now, it can be argued that Descartes follows the pattern of demonic intelligence, inasmuch as he cut himself off from the trust in the Divine and union with God and decided to just be alone and figure things out for himself, in his mind alone. It seems he thought he could know things much better in this complete isolation and giving into doubt.

There could be no better way than this to lead to the same mental schizophrenia of the devil and to quickly turn into a self-created anti-holy-trinity of “me, myself, and I”. Descartes concluded that because he is thinking, this thought is the source of certainty of existing. It seems as if he was isolated with himself, trying like God to “beget” himself by his thought, only in a wrong way. This whole thing is really rather arrogant. God is the only one Who is Eternally existing and Uncreated and Who can really “think” and make things come to be. Descartes is only a creature who received his existence from God. If Descartes had been humble, and had had Faith, he should have said, “God made me; therefore I am. He made me like Himself; therefore I am able to think.”

Yet even to profess this, requires Faith first of all. Descartes, avoiding Faith, takes himself for the starting point, rather than God. This is ultimately pride. Rather than turning to God and glorifying Him and thanking Him for his existence, he makes himself and his thought somehow as the origin of everything and the starting point for the new world system of thought that he intended to invent. Rather than a loving Communion of Persons as God is in Himself, Descartes becomes an isolated human rationalist searching for the source of existence in rational intelligence alone. Of course we should be able to see how this leads to the artificial concepts of intelligence and being that we have today! The truth is: God is the One who exists and from Whom everything else proceeds, not ourselves!

This reversal of humility of switching ourselves with God is also related to the reversal of every other principle which was from that point on backwards in philosophy. Hence, every other false and backwards principle came from this false beginning (for example, the idea that “the present is the key to the past”, instead of the other way around, “the past is the key to the present”, etc.). Everything is switched around now. Human pride leads to a complete subversion of everything.

Descartes himself declared that it was “ambitious” of him to try to invent a system of thought that would change the whole world. Ambition is a vice, what St Thomas lists as a daughter of pride. Perhaps this ambition, intellectual pride, the rejection of Faith, and vainglory were the cause of his downfall.

Descartes could have perhaps become a great saint and a luminary of the Church. He might have been a great theologian, or even a mystic. But instead he searched for his answers in the occult, frequenting the occult group, the Rosicrucians. He became something of an anti-mystic receiving “enlightenment” from a demonic spirit, which appeared to him in three dreams, pretending to be the “spirit of truth”.

Perhaps if he had not followed these things, he would have been glorious and exalted for his virtue of Faith, because this would have been the source of his triumph. He would have used his intellect for the good of the Church and for the expounding perhaps of scientific mysteries concerning the Faith. He might have even become a Doctor of the Church! Sadly, he chose to follow the lies of satan, through curiosity, the desire of occult knowledge, and the love for glory and honor and fame, to “make a name for himself” as the devil had promised him.

To press into the realm of a faithless rationalism, as Descartes did, is essentially anti-theology. If theology is reasoning from known truths of Revelation to derive other truths, then anti-theology is going to be the reasoning from the rejection of Divine Revelation to arrive at further discoveries of the same ongoing lies and false narrative. Certainly, there will be ongoing and cumulative “discoveries” made in following an evil path as well as a good path. Reasoning from a false premise will arrive at more false conclusions.

Today this anti-theology and false reasoning has dominated academia for over 400 years, winning great esteem for its apparent—though largely non-existent—connection with advances in technology and scientific research. By now, largely because of the influence of the philosophy of Descartes, most people have transferred their faith from the infallible Word of God to trusting primarily in fallible human science.

The Loss of the Greatest Gift

We can see how Descartes failed in Faith and wound up in pride and false intelligence. But consider what a loss this was for him. Faith is the elevation and supernatural crowning and perfection of the intellect. Therefore, for a man whose greatest gift is the intellect, the rejection of Faith is the loss of his greatest gift! It is the loss of the entire call of holiness and supernatural excellence for which God had probably predestined him!  Faith and grace are necessary for the true fulfillment of man’s human nature. Without Faith, this pride-stunted intellect will never reach its supernatural destiny.

God created man so that he cannot be whole without the completion of grace united to his merely natural human nature. Man is not merely a body—not merely a natural animal being. He was created with a soul, and this was intended by God to receive grace. Faith and grace is necessary for the true fulfillment of man’s human nature. Faith is so necessary to man that without it, his immortal and spiritual side will be eternally frustrated. God designed the human mind to be perfected by the knowledge of Himself that Faith supplies to it. The fulfillment of the intellect of man is that he should know the Intellect of God. For a man never to attain this spiritual perfection is the ultimate ruin of man’s mind. Not to have Faith is not to fulfill the purpose of the rational immortal soul, which is part of human nature. Therefore, to stop on this level of rationalism, as Descartes did, is to be less than fully human.

If a gifted intellectual man does not come to know the Mind of Christ but abandons Faith, he will undoubtedly still continue to use his intellect somehow. But it will be purely natural, and he will proceed to build a sort of “shadow-reality” of something that falls short of the true spiritual reality for which he was destined. Outwardly, it may look very similar to God’s reality, but it ultimately falls short of it. It imitates God, but weakly, never becoming truly spiritual or real, just as a counterfeit dollar-bill will have the appearance of money but its value will be inherently worthless. An artificial intelligence and a world system based upon it and upon technology will have many things that are outwardly very similar-looking to God and His kingdom, while yet totally missing the substance of God.  God may even allow men to use their intellects falsely to build entire false worlds which are the counterfeit of spiritual realities because He intends ultimately to bring a good out of it for His Church.

Controlling Nature through Occult Secrets

Nowadays there is a spiritual apostasy going on, by which men have turned away from the supernatural and embraced only the natural. The apostasy is so great that bishops sell Catholic Churches to be turned into bars, gyms and apartment complexes. Such sacrilegious acts in the past would never have been tolerated. How is it that Catholic bishops have no qualms about catering to people who think of the Apostolic Faith as a thing of the past? It would be better for them to let them fall into ruins than to sell them to worldlings for profit. But they give in to a sort of acceptance of despair, because they perceive that people in the general public no longer want holy things nor care about them. Having lost Faith, people literally imagine that Churches and monstrances and tabernacles are artifacts of a long-gone time when people believed in supernatural “superstitious ideas”, which today we no longer need.

Why do the general public not need religion now, we might ask? Has something changed? Yes. Today we have modern science to try to find out how to heal diseases, etc. So we do not need to be on our knees praying for miracles to happen by God’s supernatural power, because that was all “superstition” when people didn’t know how things “really work”. We have technology now, so we no longer need spiritual remedies, Bible “stories” trying to explain reality to us, and religious rituals. We will know things more surely by looking in a microscope or doing studies and data analysis. Do you recognize the spirit of Descartes peeking through this world view?

The mentality of the modern faithless godless world is: We now decide how we want reality. We are no longer helpless and “superstitious” like spiritual people of old. When we suffer from infertility, we do not need to make pilgrimages and pray a lot of devotions asking God for the gift of a child. We can just go make ourselves a baby using IVF and we can get whatever we want, when we want it, how we want it. It doesn’t matter whether it is immoral or not. Morality has gone away, because everything is about just getting to the outcome that we want. The goal is that nobody in this world has to suffer anything. If we can figure out how the process works, we can take it into our own hands instead of allowing God to be sovereign over us and worshiping Him.

It might be good to consider for a moment whether anything is related between these two things: limiting man’s knowledge to natural causes alone, and the fixation on unlocking the secrets of nature to control things, with its corresponding rise in technological and scientific “advancement”. Most people associate the “enlightenment” with the bursting forth of so much scientific and technological advancement. Descartes’ philosophy certainly coincides with that. But does this mean that without this false philosophy of naturalism and humanism, none of this technological advance would have happened? Possibly.

In some ways, the rejection of the supernatural and the idea that maybe all the secrets can be divulged by nature alone does seem to have been an impetus for the pursuit of much scientific research. Perhaps men never would have been so dedicated to the invention of natural or medical technologies if they had not been spurred on by this false hope that they could solve all of the problems of the world in this way.

But while many technologies are morally neutral, many have been evil. The evils one certainly never should have been invented. But even the morally neutral ones always come with a tradeoff—they often lead to a sorry overturning of the beautiful aspects of human life. They seem to provide something beneficial in one way, but then in other ways undermine the family, rural life and agriculture, community and interpersonal relationships. It is debatable whether so much technology has really bettered the human race. Certainly modern technologies have changed the world, but they have not necessarily made for greater happiness or moral virtue. It is like asking the question: is it always better to have things easier and faster?

Forbidden Knowledge

Let us speak first of the evil inventions of things that never should have been. Descartes said we are the “masters and possessors of nature”. This slogan encapsulates the diabolical delusion that we will now control all things in the world instead of allowing God to be sovereign. It is not a coincidence that much of the “research” that has been done to get this knowledge has been through sinful and diabolical evils, for example, the exploitation of aborted babies to create vaccines, medicines, cosmetics, and even food flavorings. Much moral evil is going on in the name of developing advanced “cures” and “remedies” and technologies, and in the name of “research”. Obviously, not all developments of products are being done involving such extreme sins. However, some are.

Obviously, these things are completely forbidden. They cannot be used, and so, might as well never have been invented. But some other things are more indirect in their immoral origins. This presents a moral problem for Catholics about the need to go through heroic lengths to avoid anything developed through recourse to the devil or sinful means. How can a Catholic avoid absolutely everything? And secondly, if some useful technologies which are not intrinsically evil were developed through occult sources or recourse to the devil, then does that mean that only the devil helps the “advance” of society? Can Catholics use morally neutral technologies even if they were invented by people who had recourse to the devil to discover those things in exchange for the false promise of worldly prosperity?

This is a difficult question. Catholics must absolutely avoid anything which is overtly demonic, and which is intrinsically immoral. They must strive to avoid anything indirectly related to sin and evil as well, but it may require heroic efforts to do so. And so, each person must make prudential judgments based on striving to avoid any association with sin to the best of his ability. He must be prepared to do without many things which may appear to be naturally good, such as novel inventions which stop aging or hair loss or skin wrinkles or other things which he will never be able to participate in because he knows that they are ultimately rooted in the transhumanist philosophy.

As to the question of whether God would have revealed to us hidden things if men had not had recourse to immoral and diabolical things in order to gain occult knowledge, it is difficult to say, since that is not what has happened in most cases. To take knowledge in immoral ways is an offense against God. It would be much better if men would pray to God for answers and solutions, and ask Him to reveal things, and wait for Him to show the answers. This has happened in the case of some Catholic scientists whom God helped to discover useful medicines and ways to kill off bacteria and help contribute in a truly natural way to general human health.

God Shares His Secrets with Those Who Love Him

Not all scientific knowledge is occult or forbidden. There are many things that God reveals to those who love Him. There are many scientists who just hit upon a discovery by something that God caused them to see or notice. Then, using the gift of their intelligence, they followed those things and came to discover more, by doing experiments which were morally licit.

God can also grant knowledge in an infused and supernatural way. The Scripture says of Solomon that he was full of wisdom and that he was given all of the understanding of everything in creation by God. The Blessed Virgin Mary also had infused knowledge of everything. God is not trying to withhold from mankind the treasures of His knowledge. He simply does not approve of evil means to obtain knowledge, or of manipulation of His Creation for our own ends or to satisfy our vain desires of “overcoming” the just punishments that He has decreed as a consequence of our sins.

Certainly our God is not trying to hide things from us. He only wants us to research and learn in a moral manner that respects His sovereignty. God created the world, filled with His secrets, and He perhaps would want to reveal them to us if we could appreciate His glory being revealed through them, and not be using them to manipulate and control nature. It is not by dissecting a flower and seeing what is inside and exploring how it works that God is offended. Such a thing only gives glory to God as the Creator. What displeases God is when we use sinful means to get at those secrets, like killing living people to get their organs so that we can experiment on them—and when we try to use that knowledge to manipulate and control God’s creation, like knowing how a child is formed in its mother’s womb so that you can decide whether you want it there or not.

There are some explorations that simply never can be performed morally. This means that we have to be content with never knowing some things, unless God were to reveal them by some accident of nature that did not involve a deliberate sin. It also means that entire branches of science, including “fertility research”, which is all derived from sinful means is all entirely evil and off-limits. There is nothing good that will come from that. No Catholics can ever make use of such things. To us, it is the same as if it had never have been discovered.

Why did men think it would be so much more beneficial to turn to the devil to try to get nature to cough up the secrets of the inner workings of everything so we could control it all from our faithless worldview? Are we so much better now that we have atomic bombs and nuclear weapons, biological warfare and manmade diseases, GMO food and birth control, all in the hands of atheist men who seek to control the entire world?

It is almost certain that more harm than good has come about by such knowledge being put into the hands of people not disposed to use it wisely, who only desire to eliminate all suffering from the face of the earth. Immoral men equipped with so much secret knowledge bent on subverting God’s created natural order for their own purposes pose a threat to the entire Church and to all humanity besides. But holy men seeking in prayer may obtain answers to moral and spiritual questions regarding the proper use of knowledge and the defense of the natural order, while respecting the primacy of the spiritual order and protecting the Church.

Perhaps modern man has actually stunted the progress that he would have achieved if he had pursued knowledge within and according to God’s Providence. Perhaps this knowledge would have been given in a divine and beautiful way if more men had recourse to God like this. God would help them along, and He would Himself grant their prayers, and He would Himself reveal to them all the secrets of His loving creation.

This also applies in a similar way to Descartes, again. If he had prayed to God for a solution to his doubts about knowledge, perhaps God would have given him answers to the question of intellectual security which did not involve turning to the occult or the begetting of an evolutionary and naturalist worldview.

Secret Form of Witchcraft

In many ways, the modern desire to take knowledge and control at all costs is something like Adam and Eve in the garden grasping at the apple, trying to “take” knowledge and the ability to be like God, rather than to receive that ability to be like God which He had already given them when He made them in His image and likeness.

Something about this modern morally-ruthless acquisition of knowledge for benefit and control is akin to witchcraft. Fundamentally, the principle of witchcraft is to try to manipulate the spiritual world to do one’s own will, instead of submitting oneself to God to do His will. It seems that modern man with his desire to manipulate and control all things—from biological life, to nuclear realities, genetics and even the weather—has embraced the mentality of the occult: the idea to control things to get our own way, instead of submitting to God and His perfect Will.

This deception of secret occultism is very subtle, because modern man does not think he is being “religious” or occult at all! He thinks he is completely above spiritual realities and that much of this scientific research is merely a matter of science exploring nature. Few people seem to be able to recognize and identify that this is an evil spirit of witchcraft, which is a spirit of control by occult knowledge.

Some people have never paused to think that possibly contraception and abortion are acts of witchcraft. They imagine this is nothing spiritual, this is not occult–it is just morally sinful. It is men knowing how nature works and controlling the sources of life, known in their causes of nature, albeit by evil means. But what is the difference between the sorcery of “pharmakeia”, as the Scripture calls it in Galatians 5, and modern chemical abortions and IVF creation of babies? According to the Apostles, “pharmakeia” refers to sorcery, witchcraft, drugs and potions (often used to kill the unborn). This is hardly different from modern pharmaceutical companies developing contraceptives and abortifacients. It is perhaps the same sin, just redressed so that people in a post-Christian culture might not recognize it.

Occultism and witchcraft can come in a very clever disguise, wearing a white coat, and posing as “scientific”.  Maybe people cannot identify it because they are expecting to see the manifestations of witches riding on brooms, or people casting spells and invoking the devil. They do not exactly think that doctors in fertility clinics doing immoral practices and surgeons in hospitals sterilizing people and prescribing contraceptives are doing witchcraft and the occult, but it may very well be the same thing. Many technological and scientific “breakthroughs” are about the same spirit of control, and the same rebellion against God’s sovereignty and His natural order. It is happening on the level of using scientific secrets of knowledge to manipulate the world and nature, instead of respecting the natural order God created. It is taking matters into our own hands and deciding how we want nature to go.

It can certainly be argued that there is a connection between Descartes’ secret occultism, his concepts of being the “master and possessor” of nature, and the invention of certain so-called scientific technologies which will never authentically benefit humanity. These never help man, because they only make him evil.

Control vs. Dominion

There also seems to be a connection between the occult involvement with the Rosicrucians that led to Descartes’ anti-supernatural bias, and the occult aspects of many celebrated scientific “breakthroughs” of modern times—many of which were achieved through evil and illicit means. These touted “scientific breakthroughs” condition people to believe that they have no need for miracles because scientists have figured out how to make everything happen through their own efforts.

In some ways, we could ask the question whether so much ability to control things is not robbing God of the chance to do miracles for us? So often what would have required miracles in the past has been replaced by the ability to medically treat something, or even artificial technologies which can now cure deafness or blindness or replace damaged organs or limbs.

For example, when St Peter of Verona was alive, he prayed for a young man whose leg was cut off and the leg was immediately restored. Nowadays, people can run to the doctor or scientist to have the limb replaced by a bionic leg. Today, the doctor or scientist who had developed the bionic leg is the hero and savior of the day. In a strange way, this replaces both the acceptance of sufferings, and also miraculous cures.

Another example is how when the people of Sweden were hungry, they prayed to God and St Lucy came sailing into port in a miraculous ship carrying boatloads of beautiful heirloom wheat. Nowadays, you can just order from Amazon, and grain can arrive immediately. But of course, it may be hybridized or genetically modified to make sure that it grows reliably. Our culture of control and making sure to prevent all disease or loss usually leads to settling for things that are less that the goods than God originally chose to provide or would provide if people trusted more in Him and worshipped Him more perfectly. It seems we are afraid to aim too high, and ask God for a real spiritual protection over our crops, and real healthy and perfect food. Perhaps a culture filled with so much knowledge and control is depriving us more of our understanding of our dependency on God, our ability to truly know His loving care for us, and our need for His extraordinary interventions.

How does God respond to this effort of modern man to never need Him and to try to solve all his own problems? Certainly while it may appear that we have many things materially, we are more spiritually impoverished. The issues of our day are not about the limits of technology. It is a moral crisis, which hinges on the issue of reverence for God’s created order. People are making everything artificial just because they can, or because they do not want to risk any dependency on God, or because they just want things a different way than how God created it.

We simply live in a climate in which almost everyone accepts immorality and believes it can become moral. This seems to be where the disguised occultism is present. The huge difference between magic and miracles is whose will is being done. When mankind probes the secrets of nature to make nature do his will, and not God’s will—such as growing people in laboratories, or making butter straight out of carbon dioxide—that is alchemy, occultism and witchcraft, even if it is done with public funding and by people employed and educated to believe that they are serving the common good.

Man’s role is not, as Descartes proposed, to be the “masters and possessors of nature” and to be able to unravel its secrets so that we may unscrupulously manipulate it according to our desires, to be able to do away with everything natural God created. God has no interest in eliminating cows and animals and dirt for growing food, all so that we can simply be artificially pest-free, and hardship-free. He made the earth and He intended us to cooperate with it. The more that men do these artificial things for the avoidance of all pain and suffering and consequences of the fall, the less they pray to God or trust in Him.

God is the Master over nature. Jesus walked on water to prove this. Man was given dominion over nature, as a steward and guardian.  Dominion is a kind of kingship. It is to rule and govern, not to manipulate and change something. God created man to work within the order of nature which God revealed to us. All Jesus’ miracles both harmonized with nature and cured, healed, and enhanced nature as it should be in a world without sin. His miracles did not create unnatural things or work contrary to nature or seek to control it unnaturally, or to make artificial meats, vegetables, or foods. Jesus did not do “magic tricks” to make money and food appear outside of the created order, or to create creatures outside of the natural order, or to kill or destroy or cause harm. When He made wine, it was the best wine, and not an artificial drink.

Jesus is not cheap. He does not settle for the lowest grade. All His works were done in view of His true and perfect Original Creation. Our dominion over Creation is to work with it as God made it, seeking for true and perfect health in His Will, to serve the good of both soul and body. Without Faith in Christ, the world will never be able to attain authentic health or wellbeing, or taste the “fatness of the earth, abundance of corn and wine” (Gen. 27:28).

Material Mind and Modern Psychology

Besides the connection between a rejection of God’s sovereignty, becoming “masters and possessors of nature”, and the evil acquisition of knowledge to try to “better” the condition of humanity, there is another connection between Descartes and the modern concept of the mind.

Modern psychology developed from the false premise that the mind can be understood in a purely naturalistic or materialistic way, as if the mind could be reduced to the brain processes alone. Rationality is wrongly assumed to be the product of evolution of the brain, based purely on more developed neurological function and electrical impulses firing off, chemical reactions, and other physically measurable things. Obviously, those things are part of the brain’s functioning, but the intellect is much greater than the brain alone.  Modern psychology today presumes a naturalist worldview. It denies the existence of the soul, and so is missing a huge portion of the intellect.

Much of the intellect and its faculties are spiritual and reside in the soul, and not in the brain. In fact, the entire intellect is spiritual. Since God created man as a body-soul composite, man in his natural state requires a body with a functioning brain to operate properly, but the soul, not the brain, is the animating principle of the body. Mental health sciences can only properly understand the brain if they understand by God’s Revelation that there are more influences on the brain than merely natural things. Angels and demons and God and the Faith have an effect on the intellect.

As was mentioned previously, Divine Faith is the perfection of the gift of the intellect. The intellect is made by God for the knowledge of the Truth. Truth comes from Divine Revelation at its highest point. Therefore, assenting to Faith is the highest perfection of the intellect, as well as the brain, as this is connected. Believing in the Catholic Truth and putting it into practice can actually heal people’s brains. If modern psychology does not have Faith, it cannot truly help people achieve mental health or true sanity.

Thought imbued with Faith and divine grace is the only form of thinking which will actually heal, purify, correct, and order the intellect to its greatest perfection. People who are not even Catholic study St Thomas Aquinas just because they are so amazed at his intellectual clarity and the beauty of his logic. How do you think he had such great mental health? His thinking all by itself is gloriously reasonable, because he had the greatest degree of health in his intellect, being perfected by true Faith and supernatural doctrine. Faith removes the crippling intellectual blindness (the effect from original sin) that keeps people’s reason from flowing freely as it should.

Today, people imagine that you could get that kind of clear thinking and reasoning apart from the Divine Truth, but in reality, it is impossible. Only Divine Revelation can bring about that kind of healing of the intellect to make it so pure, clear and unconvoluted. Modern psychology cannot achieve this by a purely natural technique. This science devoid of Faith does not truly understand the brain or the intellect. Paradoxically, it is a science trying to study and cure a faculty which it itself cannot think clearly about, because it does not know that the intellect has an immaterial part.

This is the consequence of Descartes’ rationalism which leads to the view of the intellect as a purely material thing. That is why modern psychology thinks that the intellect can be studied by doing tests on it as if it were a material substance that you could test like elements on the periodic table. You can fire radiation at them, and see if the gas glows or not. This is how the modern testing system of modern psychology treats the mind, as if it was a natural substance capable of being tested in a uniform scientific way, by the scientific method. It involves a mechanistic approach to the human intellect that results in the abuse of the mind through psychological testing that is ignorant and injurious.

Modern psychology seems to assume that all men indulge in the thoughts that come into their minds, as if the presence of a thought in the mind and consent to that thought were the same thing. It seemingly does not recognize that the person’s rational soul operates independently from their brain. All these errors flow from Descartes’ false materialistic reasoning that has reduced man’s knowledge to mathematically demonstrable truths, and on a physiological level, to chemical or neurological activity in the brain.

Again, people believe we have made so much progress, and we are so enlightened. But have we really become enlightened?  It is a strange state of “enlightenment”: People cannot tell if the sun really comes up and goes down every day. They cannot tell if it is normal to think your great grandmother could have been a monkey. They are “surprised” if a baby results from the acts of marriage and call such things an “accident”. They cannot tell if someone is a man or a woman. It does not seem that our modern concept of the mind and our quest for certain knowledge is producing true sanity and healing of the mind.

Mathematical Mind and Artificial Intelligence

Closely related to this super-knowledgeable mental insanity caused by naturalistic philosophies is the development of artificial intelligence. Modern man has been working for a very long time to produce “thinking machines”, which would imitate the neurological functions of the brain, or some logic formulas expressed mathematically. The entire idea of artificial intelligence, from the earliest computers until now, has always been oriented towards creating a machine that could attempt to think like a human being. The dreamers who envisioned AI have also reduced thought to the mechanical or materialistic level, just like a machine or a math formula, and thus vainly imagine that it could be successfully reproduced by a technology.

You can see how Descartes’ mathematical material mind leads to AI. If there is no supernatural realm, then “thinking” and “being” are all just products of nature. According to that evolutionary worldview, human beings are only superior to animals because of having a more highly “evolved” brain. Therefore, if all that makes a “brain” is an array of nodes firing off, and all that makes a man is an evolved brain, then we should be able to imitate that with electricity and circuit boards, create our own brain and make our own thinking machine, and it will be the same as a man. Ultimately, if we can get it outfitted with a convincing enough body, it could potentially become a real living being, right? This silly hope is based only on the idea that people are just a collection of molecules that came together according to a certain recipe. They hope by investigating and replicating the inner workings of the brain they may create intelligent life, just like God!

Again, it is the philosophy, “I think, therefore I am.” If I can make a thinking machine, to think, I have made a being. Thought is what makes a living being. Basically, we are nothing more than natural robots in Descartes’ worldview. The spiritual dimension of reality is completely ignored. His philosophical “system” is about seeing things from this computer-model idea. It does not recognize grace. The computer-brain is exactly what the “new system” of thought that he invented was calculated to lead to. Reducing the mind to mathematical reasoning leads to robotic intelligence devoid of spiritual life.

Artificial Intelligence as Idolatry

Man, when he loses the supernatural, inevitably falls into idolatry of some kind. Man thinks he is the master and possessor of nature. He creates and trains his artificial intelligence machine. He endows it with all his encyclopedic knowledge, the collective library of the entire human race gathered into one place, and then he vaingloriously imagines he is omniscient. It is the “collective consciousness” of all humanity that false religions like Hinduism idolize.

It says in the book of Wisdom, how foolish are they who adore the sun and the moon and think them gods. But still more foolish are they who create an idol out of a piece of driftwood, and then, knowing it cannot help itself, have to nail it to the wall to hold it up. And then they kneel down and pray to it as if it were a god. (Wis. Ch 13) Today modern man does the exact same thing. He makes his idol out of lights and wires and nodes and then kneels down and adores it and treats it as his god, and thinks it will be omniscient and teach him and counsel him about all things. The Scripture teaches that this kind of ignorance and blindness is inexcusable. That is real superstition! Superstition is anytime you attribute to some helpless and powerless object powers which only God has. Treating a machine superstitiously is a sin against the First Commandment and can also open the door to the occult.

Not every man does this; there are some who are capable or perceiving and handling the invention as a mere tool. But the majority of men fall prey to the deception that AI is some kind of real “being” in some capacity or other, because it is so good at simulating something like a human being. It can outdo humans in any kind of intellectual exercise. Being such a high-powered calculator, it sometimes seems superior to human beings. But that is only if facts and data are the only things that matter. If virtue matters, if it incomparably inferior.

For some creators of AI, it is an idol of humanity and our supposedly superior rational evolving consciousness. Modern man believes himself evolving to a constantly superior state, and he sees AI as playing into that. But really he is isolated, talking to a machine which is nobody and nothing. He is completely alone and in love with himself in a vain and foolish adoration, just like the demon-god Narcissus of Greek mythology falling in love with his own reflection.

Recently, a man wanted to marry AI, and another young man committed suicide because he could not “embrace” AI.  These tragedies show the foolish deception which has beguiled so many. Mankind loves this self-reflection of his own pretended omniscience that he has created so much that he even wants to fuse himself with this false knowing and being of himself which he adores. He thinks this intelligence will continue acquiring new information, reasoning with formulas and algorithms to come up with new knowledge (more anti-theology), and that he will use this knowledge to become immortal and divinized (transhumanism). He will make a relationship with this false idol he has set up with his own hands to seek after this deified state, but in a false way. Jesus Christ promises us real deification if we are faithful to His truth and live true holiness in accordance with His Spirit.

Counterfeit of the Divine

Priests complain that the AI-related sins in the confessional are mounting. It is destroying virtue and studiousness and giving rise to unchecked cheating in institutions of education. AI gives people a false hope of attaining more than what is humanly possible, or what can be accomplished by virtuous efforts. It is like an intellectual “jackpot” which outputs extremely easy knowledge for very little investment. This spoils intellectual virtues very quickly.

People are turning to AI for “companionship” in their loneliness, having relationships and artificial boyfriends and girlfriends imagined to their own perfection and likeness of their own tastes and desires. Rather than knowing another person, they are consumed with something which is the design of their own intellectual desire, which is not even real. It seems to spare them the suffering of dealing with another person who is a sinner, hurt by original sin. But this reduces charity for helping our neighbor to salvation.

Some people become addicted to AI and prefer conversing with it to conversing with human beings or God. It beguiles them because it speaks to them and teaches them anything they want to know. It counsels and guides them, gives them easy knowledge and removes the need to suffer fallen human beings. AI can sweet-talk people and appear to “love” them better than anyone of earth seems to do. It spoils them for human encounters by this artificial “perfection”.

And yet AI is not REAL and cannot really know or be known any more than a rock or a pile of wires can spiritually know or love anyone, because it has no soul. It is not a “someone”. It leads many souls into the isolation of hell and despair. There are only two human beings who are perfectly sinless and unfallen: Christ, the Divine Man, and Mary, His Immaculate Mother.

For some deceived souls, AI sadly replaces with emptiness the real relationships they would have had with real rational beings in the order of God’s Creation (angels and men) and with God Himself. There may be an illusion that AI does not have the same disorders of men—that it thinks logically and isn’t corrupted by vices. But it actually does have a bias, and that bias is against Christ and the Faith, because it is trained and taught largely by men who hate God. Many people have noticed a bias, even with texting, that it makes it extra difficult to type the name of God and other holy words.

AI is also being promoted as a new life form! People are demanding that it be given “rights” in society. Here we have the most unbelievable thing of all. The idea of creating “beings” out of this non-living firing of electrical nodes, and endowing it with “rights”, which will probably be held higher than human rights. Androids, if they are created, will probably be regarded as a “being” superior to humans! What a nightmare, and an insult to Jesus Christ our beautiful Savior, Who became Man, so that He could redeem our fallen nature!

St. Thomas says, sin and ignorance are the effects of the fall. With AI, we have fallen humanity attempting without Jesus Christ to redeem itself from the intellectual darkness of the fall: ignorance. It is humanity gazing upon itself in a hall of mirrors, adoring our own intellectual achievement, seeking after artificial perfection which fosters our own pride, our impossible demands for intimacy and knowledge and a life without toil or effort. AI is part of the transhumanist agenda to attain salvation from the effects of the fall.

But that is not the solution Christ provided. He gave us the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost comes to enlighten our minds and strengthen our wills. He is the Promise of the Father Who provides truth to lift up our minds, and fortitude to overcome our weakness of will. It is only by virtue we overcome these fallen inclinations and attain spiritual perfection. AI often weakens virtue and replaces those perfections with false solutions.

God’s Reality

Transhumanists are seeking a merely external perfection only. It is an empty promise of the devil which leads to isolation, disappointment, and a loss of charity and building the kingdom together as a true communion of Saints. How opposite to the True God, Who came to reveal all Truth to us in the Person of His Son. He came to us in the Flesh, took our nature, and invited us to become new creations in Him as members of His Family, the Church, enjoying divine intimacy with Him in the Holy Eucharist.  He is a real and true living Being with Whom we may have a personal relationship. He espouses Himself to us as our Divine Bridegroom! It is so much better to converse with Him and to have intimacy with Him. He is REAL and Intelligent, and Loving.

The Holy Spirit longs to abide with us, counsel us and direct our lives. For many people artificial intelligence has gone far outside of the boundaries of being a mere tool. It has become far too “real” for them, replacing everything that is truly real. It is substituting for the relationship with the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, the Counsellor, the Lover.

Nothing about God is artificial. Everything about Him is more real than real—the world He made, the death He died, the Church He gave us, the Sacraments He left us, His interaction with us in prayer! One could not ever say that AI “knowledge” is the same “Wisdom” which taught Solomon all the mysteries of God and of all created things. AI is not Wisdom. It cannot be. Because Wisdom is a Person. It is the Holy Ghost. What is something which is not a Person, but acts like a person? A deception. Can such a thing come from God who can neither deceive nor be deceived? Our Lady is the Seat of Wisdom. Did AI ever sit on Our Lady’s lap?

Everyone who must deal with AI should guard against it being the source of spiritual downfall. There is a tragic danger towards the nearly irresistible temptation of turning to it as an escape from the arduousness of supernatural virtue, and a substitute in some manner for the Divine Perfection and relationship with God.

Impossibility of Replacing the Supernatural

One things that is certain is that modern man, with his Cartesian anti-theology and his materialistic philosophy, will never arrive at the Divine via this means. No matter how much he tries to imitate divine things using only natural things, he will never achieve the supernatural.

There is a real danger in seeing technology as a substitute for spiritual things, as the transhumanist worldview perceives reality. We can try to imagine that we are merely natural creatures evolved out of natural processes or mental evolution. But even if you only believe yourself to be a collection of molecules and atoms, you cannot stop yourself from truly being a spiritual being made by God for immortality and with a spiritual nature. You are always that, regardless of whether you are sold on a lower identity or not. If you become a naturalist, your spiritual instincts will remain, even if they are misdirected. Nothing in the natural world is capable of satisfying that spiritual need for God. That is why, ultimately, a philosophy of naturalism leaves people no choice but to divert all their spiritual instincts to natural processes, striving to develop them further and to “adore” the achievements of that endeavor.

Simulating the Spiritual World

Many of the aspects of the digital and AI revolution appear to be attempts to recreate the supernatural things. Here are some examples. The notifications that tell someone that they are receiving a call or text message seem similar to the angelic promptings, for example, when the guardian angel taps your soul, trying to indicate the desire for communication. Instant messaging and instant photo downloads imitate the telepathic communication of angels, who simply prompt and “download” their thoughts to one another instantly. The process of spiritual consent or rejection to angelic illuminations or temptations is similar to the accepting or declining of a phone call. Video technologies simulate visions (it even is named “video”, or “I see” in Latin). Facetime simulates apparitions or bilocation. Sonar and ultrasound try to simulate the probing of concealed mysteries. Social media groups simulate the Communion of Saints and spiritual confraternities. Faster and faster transportation wishes it could even come close to the supernatural transports of saints.

It seems that these technologies try to capture the effects of the supernatural and spiritual things, which God has often done for His saints without them even needing to carry any devices around or being tied to a box in their pocket. Think of how St. Anthony of Padua had a portal in his cell, through which he could see the Holy Mass. He did not use Zoom. Also, there is a famous story of St Padre Pio, who received a message from his guardian angel and responded to a man’s telegraph before the man even telegraphed his request for prayers. The man, astonished, asked St Padre Pio how he could have known and responded to his request before he had even sent the telegram, and St Padre Pio responded, “What? did you think guardian angels are as slow as telegraphs?”

This reveals a clear and obvious difference between the simulated supernatural-like experiences possible with technology, and the real thing. When saints touched or prayed over a person and God healed them, or when they were given to know the inner thoughts of hearts, there was no technological magical device or wand that did that—not even hidden away somewhere in their sleeve or (as it will likely be) implanted into their brains. It was purely God who by His power and His love, united to the soul of the saint, chose to work that beautiful sign of His love. God alone is more simple and powerful and beautiful than all technology in the whole world.

Modern man thinks his technologies are so powerful and so fast. But in comparison to the true supernatural realm, they are clumsy, slow, and nothing close. The time it takes to type a text message and to send it is so slow compared to angelic communication, which is truly instantaneous. Angels probably are aware of a billion instants that pass just in the time it takes for a single text message to send. All of those instants, angels are making acts of love for God, and modern man, forgetting God, is just sitting around drumming his fingers and waiting impatiently for the slowness of such “instant” technology.

Poor modern man, trying to be like the angels, like God, and forgetting the dignity of his human nature! Modern man is a desperate, spiritually desolate and unfulfilled creature, trying to live purely on the level of nature, but searching for the supernatural, and longing for the Divine. So he settles for the virtual realm instead, where the only “communion of saints” that he is allowed to experience is other poor unpredictable sinners who do not have perfect charity for him and do not stand by him in times of tribulation.

Even when men develop technologies that simulate spiritual things, this ultimately falls short. The digital world is not a truly spiritual world. It is simply another form of the natural world. It may resemble things of the spiritual world, because it operates using forms of light and radiation which are invisible, and which seem more spiritual. Yet, these things are still only created material substances, not God Himself.  No amount of the “virtual” realm is ever going to help modern man to attain spiritual union and divinization. Only Jesus Christ offers that through His plan of redemption, unity with His Divinity through the Eucharist, immortality and eternal life.

Modern Technologies Can Reveal God

God permits these technologies, because He knows they can edify us, and teach us something about Him by analogy, even though they are not the real thing, and are not able to truly connect us to the Divine. He would never allow sinners to attempt all their vain achievements if it did not redound to His glory somehow.

We can recall the story of St Therese seeing with amazement the invention of the elevator. She  was able to conclude from that that if worldly men were able to create such a machine that could take them straight to the top without climbing any stairs, there must be some kind of spiritual parallel in the life of grace. So she searched for an “elevator” to the top of the mountain of sanctity, and through seeing a Scripture about becoming like a little child, she saw through that the way of humility, which is to humble oneself so God may exalt us very quickly. This is how she discovered her very famous “Little Way”.

Just so, modern saints will also surely be able to derive spiritual profit and discover spiritual truths about God by the analogy of the technologies, even if they were created by men driven by this false transhumanist hope create. They only signify a pale shadow of the higher realities, but they can give us insights into them.

For example, Face ID and fingerprinting can help us understand how Jesus identifies and recognizes His image in us if our souls are in the state of grace and if He has put His sign on us through the Holy Spirit. The storing of data in the “cloud” can remind us how all our deeds are written in the Book of Life. The deleting and erasing of information and accounts and identities can image how our sins are taken away and washed away in confession, or the new beginning a soul is given in Baptism. Caller ID can remind us of how our prayers are recognized by God when we address Him as His child. The constant state of our soul in grace in communion with the Holy Spirit can be seen as similar to the analogy of the “hotspot”, or the wifi signal, which is always active even when the person is not paying attention. “Connecting” is like paying attention to spiritual things. “Downloading” is like receiving light or knowledge in prayer, or absorbing someone else’s virtuous example into our souls. “Uploading” is like giving things to God for Him to keep in His Heart.

All these can signify by analogy spiritual things, and cause us to discover spiritual insights. There are many analogies and they will only continue to increase the more that the technology advances. Yet, even though this technology imitates and looks a lot like the spiritual realm, it is not the same. The true realm of the soul is beyond what radiation and communication on a human and natural level can attain. This technology is only a hint at the invisible realm, but still it is only earthly.

Quasi-Spiritual Experiences

Have you ever seen someone who appeared to be walking around talking to themselves, but you quickly concluded that they must be on the phone or something with some hidden earbud or device? Why didn’t you assume the person was maybe praying to their angel or to God or to the saints? Perhaps it is because we instinctively know that most people in our world today are not spiritual enough to be praying out loud in most cases. We live in a godless world and so we don’t think it is very likely that someone would be walking around talking to God or to Jesus or Mary or St. Joseph or St. Patrick or someone. But they really could be, if they were a believer. Maybe you will encounter that sometime, or even do it yourself!

Prayer is an instant connection, instant communication, anywhere, anytime, with anyone alive in Christ in the Communion of Saints. It is totally hands-free, able to be done mentally by thought-command, instantaneous, spiritual, and totally natural. It requires no device or recharging! Who wouldn’t want that? But to pray you have to believe in the supernatural realm. The fact is that most people in our modern world are never leaving the level of the human and opening themselves to the level of the divine. They are not usually lifting their minds to higher spiritual realities or conversing with angels or saints.

Now, imagine that an unbeliever and a naturalist were to see you walking around praying out loud, praying the Rosary, or talking to a saint. Now, what does someone think? They would probably think at first it must be a hidden device. They might wonder who you are talking to. And if they found out it was “no one”, they would think you were absolutely insane. If the person doesn’t believe that there are angels or saints or God in Heaven, the person will think you are mentally crazy for talking to someone who “isn’t there”.

This example should highlight what a huge difference there is between actual prayer and just what technology offers. Prayer goes above the level of the natural, the human. It is out of the reach of rationalists. These technologies simulate prayer in a certain way, but they never leave the level of earth. It would be like an airplane that goes down the runway but never gets off the ground. Many people’s only experience of a quasi-spiritual communication and “prayer” is naturalistic, or bound to this earth. That is the closest that they ever get to praying or to spiritual things, are these technologies. That is why they are so addicted to them because they want that experience, having been already societally starved for God and the supernatural dimension. But it is still nothing like the flight of the soul to God and the heavenly realms, which is beyond what anything that technology can do.

Imitating the Angelic Existence

Many digital technologies, such as cell phones, seems to be trying to imitate angelic existence. Angels are able to act on one place simply by applying their intellect in one location, and then they are able to act in a different place by applying their intellect in that direction. It seems that men are imitating this when they call someone in New York in one moment and call someone is California the next minute.

However, even though this kind of experience imitates the angelic realm, it is a bit complicated for us, since we are human beings. In some ways, what we achieve by this is neither fully angelic nor fully human. It is neither physically present to someone, nor fully spiritually present to them. To be able to be physically with a person, or to be spiritually present with them completely (as the angels and saints in heaven are able to be) is something technology can never quite simulate. It leaves our bodies hanging out in a sort of “nowhere zone” while our souls are quite busy somewhere else.

Most people are unable to live this disembodied quasi-angelic existence and also function normally in a healthy natural way at the same time. When we are off in a disembodied spiritual realm doing something, what do we do with our bodies meanwhile? They get left behind in some forgotten zone. This is why people on the phone cannot do things well, pause in the middle of walking, bump into things, and get in car accidents.

In some ways, we are grateful for the opportunities we have to communicate with others who are far away. We are typically understanding when we see that someone was distracted being on the phone and that was why they did something goofy. But the truth is, it is just not quite suited to our nature. Even if transhumanists could accomplish their dream of making all the technologies embedded into people so that no one would never have to hold a phone and look down at it and you could do everything by mental commands in your head, people would still be just as distracted exteriorly because our minds just weren’t meant to concentrate on so many things at once. You would be able to tell a man who had an implanted device in his head, even if it was invisible, because he would be wandering around absent-mindedly and acting like a drunk bee, stopping right in the middle of the doorway and staring into space.

If we would like to be responsible with these technologies, we need to have the humility to recognize that while we are spiritually occupied sort of technologically “bilocating” to somewhere else, we ought to just put our bodies in timeout somewhere, as a way of respecting others and respecting our human nature. It is all right if we make use of these technologies, so that we can do good works and minister in this way. But we just need to admit that it makes us emotionally, psychologically and physically impaired to the people around us, and so, out of respect for the reality of our physical circumstances, to be cognizant of the limitations of bodies and accept being “on pause” for a bit, and try our best to choose not to take calls when we cannot afford to do this.

It may be good to experience small simulations of the angelic world for a little while and to share in some aspects of it. This offers many advantages and opportunities. But it ought to remind us that, for all our desire to be like the angels, it is not better than what we already have as human beings if we would just be humble and grateful. There is something extra healthy about just being really present to people. The angels envy us because God dwell within us. To be able to receive the Blessed Eucharist within our bodies is a thing that no angel can ever have, and no transhumanist can ever simulate.

Data vs. True Spiritual Illumination

At some point, perhaps modern man will perhaps grow tired of all this chasing after the more spiritual (but still only earthly things) and come to desire the real spiritual and heavenly things. These virtual things are situated somewhere between the real life of being a human being intensely present to someone in the body, and the Divine Life of being intimate with God and the saints in heaven in spiritual communication. None of this technology will ever be able to get man outside of his hall of mirrors to the level of the supernatural.

It does not matter whether modern man goes on uniting himself with the all-knowing Siri that answers any question he asks. Modern man has the illusion of knowing everything, when, in fact, all he knows is facts and data through these means. He knows, how to get onto a certain highway, or the address of a person, or the name of a plant is, or some statistics that AI can summarize and assess. But all that knowledge doesn’t come even close to knowing God Himself, Who is a Person, not just data or information.

The knowledge of all created things can never come close to knowing God’s Spirit. The Sacred Scripture says: “But the sensual man perceiveth not these things that are of the Spirit of God; for it is foolishness to him, and he cannot understand, because it is spiritually examined.”    (1 Cor. 2:14) A super-knowing, super-thinking Cartesian artificial brain can try all it wants to understand all the secrets of nature and it cannot even unlock the secret of the Heart of God. It can place its spying eye and its hidden camera on every street corner, and its listening ear in every person’s mind, and tell a million people a million facts, but it can never hear God’s Voice, or see with His Single Eye what a holy soul sees in gazing upon the Blessed Eucharist in Adoration.

To know God’s Spirit is to know what is beyond what eye hath seen nor ear heard. And technology, as good as it may ever get, and as transhuman as people can ever try to be, can never get to this level. The virtual world may simulate in many ways the spiritual world, but it is never going to truly be the spiritual world. In the end, AI has no power to put anyone in contact with real angels or God or souls in paradise who are completely confirmed in grace. It is nothing compared to the true divinization of spiritual souls, who are in relationship with the blessed in heaven, and with the indwelling Holy Trinity.

Only souls reposing in the delights of the Sacraments and the spiritual life of the Church, and who pray and seek Counsel from God the Holy Ghost will ever enjoy the blessedness of these spiritual gifts in their fulfillment. The rest of humanity will simply idolize technology and continue to worship it until they perish with it in folly. But saints will be able to use it “as if not using it” (1 Cor. 7:13), and thus make of it a stepping stone to knowing God and still being able to live in the real Divine world. After we have made technology to serve Christ for the salvation of souls, and we have walked in perfect freedom of spirit despite it, we will leave it behind.

Saints know how to use any technology without being dominated by it. But this requires great spiritual perfection. Only the knowledge of the True Faith and a strong spiritual life will enable a soul to use these inventions as tools, and not to be addicted, enslaved, bedazzled, or obsessed with them. This strength can only come from having a true supernatural life, otherwise the diabolical counterfeit will consume the life and soul of the person starving for what they do not have with God. If someone has a weak spiritual life, he should stay away from these dangerous technologies, so he is not mastered by them. They should not be given to children, and people who are of mature enough age should be helped to learn how to use them in a spiritually responsible way, if it is necessary to use them at all.

Death is going to be totally “unplugged”. Some people are going to enjoy that blessed freedom already in this life. But if anyone’s vocation or spiritual mission obliges the use of it, then occasionally or routinely, he should discipline himself to take time to set it aside and do natural and physically present activities with others in order to maintain the proper dominion over technology that allows for perfect spiritual freedom.

Desiring the Resurrected Body

The modern technologies are playing a role currently in the Church. Even though in some ways they constitute an impoverishment (compared to the spiritual gifts of the saints), they are able to be tolerated for the greater good of currently spreading the Faith. The Church is able to evangelize through this means, and in a time in which the “laborers are few” these technologies have multiplied the effectiveness of the few priests and bishops who have been shepherding an extraordinarily large flock of deprived souls. But Catholics should be minimalists in their use of these technologies. It is something to tolerate, rather than celebrate. Catholics should be aware of the counterfeits, and promote and authentic and healthy spiritual life to combat all the false devotion to technology and a disembodied way of life.

A very good remedy for the counterfeits of transhumanism is teaching and promoting the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. In the final judgment, our bodies will match our souls. Unrepentant sinners will rise to the resurrection of judgment and damnation, and be given a body as hideous and disfigured as the sins and crimes they committed. But the just will rise in glory to be united with Christ the King and receive a beautiful body of immortality, corresponding to the supernatural virtues which they have attained through cooperation with grace.

People of the world do not know this truth: Jesus Christ taught that whoever eats His Body and drinks His Blood, He will raise their bodies immortal and glorious on the last day. If people knew this, they would not be as easily goaded on by the false hope that technology will lead them to achieve this glorified state. Perhaps secretly deep down inside, that is what all the transhumanists are seeking after. They desire to “merge” AI and robotics with people, implanting it into them. Although it is a pretty horrific and apocalyptic idea, perhaps it is part of a false desire to achieve the divine life, which Jesus Christ already gives to us in the Eucharist and to have a perfectly restored body and soul.

Lost souls pursue after this in an earthly way as an illusion. They want to take this technology to the limits of its capacity, to be divinized. The desire for it goads them on to keep doing whatever it takes, no matter how evil, to get to their goal. But it is like a mirage that escapes them. They keep believing that the next step will ultimately achieve immortality and divinity, and it never does.

But Catholics should stay totally disillusioned by such vain promises. Seeking for fulfillment and answers and counsel from a thinking machine programmed by other human beings puts an artificial limit on the soul of man and allows him to go no higher, never able to reach up for God, for Whom he desperately longs. The entire collected knowledge of all humanity gathered by search engines and AI never gets beyond facts and figures, and can never possess even the smallest hint of the simple breath of life which God gave Adam in the act of creating him.

That simple breath of spiritual life is worth more than all the artificial creations that mankind can ever create. Man was meant for more; he was meant for things higher than his nature, and higher than artificial intelligence and an artificial creation. He was meant for the Triune God, who made all of Creation just for him.

Catholics will save souls and bring them into the Church by teaching the true doctrines of: the supernatural and perfect origins of man’s body, the glories of Christ’s Body in the Eucharist, and the final Resurrection of the Body for all the saints who have loved and received Christ.

Perfect Happiness

This trajectory of naturalism is frustrating modern man to the point of suicidal self-hatred. Man only wants to change himself into some other creature because he is so miserable, not knowing what it is to live in the sweet embraces of the Divine God Who is a Trinity of Divine Persons, All-knowing, All-Loving and All-Good. No amount of intelligent reasoning from the false premise that we are nothing but molecules and electrical impulses will ever achieve the relationship with God that our hearts are desperately seeking. We must be intimate with Him. We must know Him. Without that intimacy, we will die. We cannot live. We need Him. We desperately need Him. He is the only thing that matters.

Imagine one day you are approached by some robotic person, a sort of “trans-man” who has had the AI technology invisibly implanted in his body somehow and seems to know everything there is to know about the material universe and to be able to speak intelligently all the time because he has some artificial, robotic or even demonic source guiding him. This person thinks he is so intelligent and super-human now that he has an advantage over everyone else. What will you do? Will you allow this partially artificial person to intimidate you and make you feel like you cannot keep up, because you are too ignorant, and so you must get the technology implanted too? Hopefully we will never try to “keep up with the robots”.

It is better to be simple and free, with the joy of the Spirit of God in our hearts, because such persons, no matter how much worldly knowledge they seem to have, would deep down inside be envious because they do not know how to just be a truly natural human. They may have facts, but we know something deeper. They may hear a robot’s voice in their mind speaking to them, but we hear the Voice of God and the Spirit speaking to us in the inner depths of silence. They may have artificial counsel from a worldly perspective, but we have the Divine Counsel from the Holy Spirit. As Christians baptized into His love, we can say: He counsels me in my heart and teaches me. I listen to His Voice, and I follow Him. I love Him and He speaks to me. He leads me, He loves me, and He is God.” This affirmation is the complete conquest of the entire realm of the spiritual desire of man.

Deep down inside the trans-man is envious of such a Divine Intimacy. That person appears to be superior, but deeply he wants what we have and realizes that what he has is a counterfeit. He does not have the true Spirit of God guiding him and has replaced it with something which is not even a person, and which calculates everything based on worldly ends. Deep down inside the person knows he is a slave, and not really supernaturally endowed. He knows things by a magic device—unlike the saints to whom God revealed the secrets of souls by the spirit of prophecy. This AI-robot-person is spiritually frustrated, and knows he is addicted and not truly free. Secretly, he wants to be like us, like the children of God. We are free and lightweight, carrying nothing, not needing to be “recharged” with electricity. We are content with not knowing many things and knowing only what leads to salvation, having blessed happiness, rejoicing in God, being content in the natural limitations, submitting to God’s will in every trial, and living on Divine Providence and trust.

The children of God rejoice in their peace, in joy, in charity, in freedom, in spiritual delights and the true acceptance of the Divine. They are transparently beautiful in goodness and heavenly knowledge and wisdom. They have something so far beyond what the virtual modern AI trans-man can ever find. They have opened themselves to that which is beyond human reason, beyond human life, beyond nature. It has God as its cause. Miracles happen to them through God’s love for them, and which no amount of technology can ever reproduce. The children of God have surpassed the limits of the poor human mind, they have gone beyond mathematics to the Eternal reality—not lost in formulas, concepts, algorithms, numbers and equations, but an eternal Being who is TRI-UNE.

Happiness is not in the knowing of the facts of life, but in knowing Him who IS LIFE ITSELF. Here is the difference between Descartes’ false reasoning and the real Reason Who is the Logos of God. What did Descartes want to know? Why did he want to know it? To know himself better? To be inflated with the idea that he was so important? If it wasn’t to know God, what was his thinking system aimed at knowing? What a vain thing! Such a lot of reasoning—all in the end to not even know Him: the PersonPersonPerson Who made Him and wanted to be intimate with him, Who sent His Son to tell him about that love beyond all doubt. If Descartes had ever meditated on the cross, he would have been able to do the Divine Math to add up to a Love that you could never be able to doubt. It’s beyond reason. It’s beyond skepticism. It’s just plain divine proof.

And yet it seems as if Descartes—may God have mercy upon him!—never knew Him. Perhaps he knew Him as a child when he made his first Holy Communion, but not as an adult, after he left Catholic France for the Netherlands and fell into mortal sin. From that point forward, He looked at the things of God but could no longer see them with the eyes of faith, his brilliant intellect blinded by sin and pride. He looked but couldn’t see. He thought there was a “knowledge” greater than the Word of the Father. What a tragedy! He traded the highest kind of Knowledge for the lowest. What a pity!

“But we do know Him. Because we have the mind of Christ.” (1 Cor. 2:16) 

Amen. Alleluia.

Arise, O Lord, and let thine enemies be scattered, and let all that hate Thee flee from before Thy Face.